Joel Brown's Weblog

Creator 2 3rd party DB Driver Support

Creator ships with DB drivers that we support.  Recent MySQL drivers are also supported.

But what about other drivers?

Here's how to determine if your driver works:

Add a datasource using your driver and database.  See the Tutorials page for  Creating Database Server Types and Data Sources.

In the servers pane, open up your data source node and see if you can see any tables.

If that works, pick a double and double click to "View Data".  Now alter the query, prefixing it with "smd " (this is an undocumented command).  E.g., "smd select * from myTable".  Run.

This creates a PreparedStatement for the given SQL and outputs the ResultSet from the preparedStatement.getMetaData() call.

If data is displayed, does it look "reasonable"?   Most important are the ColumnName and Type columns.  For a valid example, compare it to data from a supported driver (e.g., a table in our bundled database).

Does it throw an exception?  If so, it's not supported and will not work at design time.  Period. 

All the failures I've seen so far are because PreparedStatement.getMetaData() does not work, usually throwing a "not supported" exception.  Some drivers support this call after statement execution, but we require support before executing the statement.

Add a comment to this entry with the driver/database that you'd like to see supported.  Even if someone else has mentioned your database, comment yourself.  Supporting additional drivers is on the unfinalized list of features for next release (no promises!).

Posted at 08:24AM Jan 26, 2006 by jfbrown in Creator  |  Comments[3]